'Truth spoken without moderation reverses itself'
This blog is a source for intellectual exploration. It includes a list of alternative resources and a source of free books. The placement of an article does not imply that I agree with it, merely that I found it thought-provoking. There are also poems and book reviews. Texts written by me are labelled. Readers are free to re-post anything they like.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Christopher Kissane: ‘Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard’

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past George Orwell, 1984

On the 500th anniversary of the
Reformation, historian Mary Beard calls for an end to the trivialisation of the
lessons of the past

Five hundred years
ago, Martin Luther sparked a movement of Reformation that would
leave indelible marks on European history. While some have used this
anniversary as an opportunity for reflection, and others a chance to heal old wounds, 2017 finds us in an age of intense historical
myopia. Breathless news cycles and furious outrage are shrinking our horizons
just as they need to widen. Public debate barely remembers the world of last
year, “old news”, let alone that of a decade or few ago.

History’s expertise,
and most dangerously its perspective, are being lost in our inability to look
beyond the here and now. We stumble into crises of finance and inequality with ignorance of economic history, and forget
even the recent background to our current politics. We fail to think in the long
term and miss a growing environmental catastrophe. We refuse help to millions of refugees
by turning away from our own history. As technology and globalisation bring the world closer
together, we have narrowed rather than broadened our perspective. With
challenges on many fronts, history needs to be at the heart of how we think
about our ever-changing world.

Instead, history’s
prominence in Britain is too often reduced to a seemingly endless parade
of Tudors, Victorians and the second world war. When history does
appear in public debate, it is generally in the form of facile analogies, from
all manner of centenary comparisons to the first world warto the Reformation, as “the first Brexit” or “this generation’s Dunkirk”. Such lazy attempts to equate the
present and the past are actively misleading, a pointless parlour game that
crowds out the vital role of history in understanding current affairs. Instead
of examining the historical trends in American economy and culture that have
produced Trump, we ask if he is “the new Hitler”.

The renaissance of
populist nationalism embodied by Trump has been built on mythic history, the
lie that “the good old days” have been lost. Brexit springs from a nation where
most still see centuries of rapacious and oppressive empire as “a good thing”, its complicated histories and harsh realities actively ignored. Just this week, Cambridge historian Mary Beard
has received vitriolic abuse for defending the historical consensus that
there was diversity in Roman Britain, while teaching the long history of
migration to Britain was branded “disturbing” and “dangerous” by rightwing commentators. Glorious ignorance is the ideology of the nation’s drift to
isolation… read more: